Polyglot Blog

Alex Rawlings is a polyglot who blogs about it here and also teaches workshops on it.

The Scientist in the Crib

Since becoming a parent, I’ve gotten even more interested in children, their language acquisition, and their development, so I recently read The Scientist in the Crib by Alison Gopnik, Andrew N. Meltzoff and Patricia K. Kuhl.

The book is about how children learn about the world and what we adults can learn from studying children, especially babies. There’s a chapter particularly about how children learn language. But what is actually involved in learning a tongue? “First, you have to break up the continuous stream of sounds into separate pieces and identify each sound accurately...Then you have to string the sounds together into words...Then you need to understand all the nuances of meaning each word can have...And, finally, you have to figure out something about the larger intent of the sentence.” (p. 92-3) Gopnik, Meltzoff and Kuhl call it “code-breaking” and say how challenging it is, but “most complicated of all, people speaking different languages hear sounds totally differently.” (p. 96)

But what does language do for us anyway? Well, ”the most obvious advantage of language is that it lets us communicate and coordinate our actions with other people in our group…The fact that we speak different languages also lets us differentiate between ourselves and others…And the development of language is probably linked to the development of our equally distinctive ability to learn about people and things. It allows us to take advantage of all the things that people before us have discovered about the world.” (p. 100)

Here’s how it works: “Babies master the sounds of their language first, and that makes the words easier to learn….Babies seem to learn some general rules about the words in their particular language before they learn the words themselves.” (p. 109) As parents, we need to talk to our babies often, especially in a slow and slightly exaggerated way, so they can hear the sounds and then start understanding the words.

If, like me, you hope your child will learn a language from a young age, when should you start? The earlier the better. “Children who learn a second language when they are very young, between three and seven years of age, perform like native speakers on various tests…If you learn a second language after puberty, there is no longer any correlation between your age and your linguistic skill…Early in development we are open to learn the prototypes of many different languages. But by the time we reach puberty, these mental representations of sounds are well formed and become more fixed, and that makes it more difficult to perceive the distinctions of a foreign language.” (p. 192-3)

The Scientist in the Crib is an interesting, if somewhat repetitive, book, and I recommend it to parents in particular.

Bilingual By Music

I discovered Bilingual By Music recently and love the idea. It’s a CD set with two CDs. Each CD has children’s songs on it, but sung in two languages, English and Swedish. It’s a great way for children (and adults) to learn or improve their language skills. I’ve been listening to the Swedish CD with my daughter a lot and we both love it. I believe Bilingual By Music also has a Danish version, and I hope they produce some other languages as well, because music is an excellent entry into a language.

More on Hyperpolyglots

In the last post, I discussed Michael Erard’s book Babel No More. In the book, he offers some resources for learning more about hyperpolyglots and about learning languages in general. I haven’t yet been able to get any of these books/websites, but I hope to. Here’s a selection:

Andrew Cohen: Strategies in Learning and Using a Second Language

Earl Stevick: Success with Foreign Languages

Carol Griffiths: Lessons from Good Language Learners

Erik Gunnemark: Art and Science of Learning Languages

Polyglot Project: http://www.polyglotproject.com/

Language Hacking Guide: http://www.fluentin3months.com/language-hacking-guide-is-ready/

He also recommends the ASSiMiL language courses.

Babel No More

What is a hyperpolyglot? Someone who knows many languages. But how many? Six? Eight or more? Eleven? Or even 30? And what does “know” mean? Being able to speak, write, read and listen like a native speaker? Being able to talk about daily matters? Having a basic conversation? Just saying a few words? Or…?

In Babel No More by Michael Erard, Erard travels around the world to explore what it really means to learn a language, how the brain deals with language, and how you can learn many tongues. He meets researchers, neuroscientists, people who know many languages, and others, and he visits multilingual groups, such as in India.

He shows how our view of language in general and multilingualism in particular has changed over time. Erard writes, “Go back to prehistory, a time of linguistic wildness, when we can imagine that each roving band of humans grunted its own dialect, and uncountable versions of half-congealed speech codes could be overheard at every cave and watering hole. Any one of these codes had a range, not a center nor an edge; not until bands clashed, merged or partnered and settled into villages did they acquire a physical place, a homeland. Over thousands of years, these became city-building empires that swept many languages away. On borders and in cities, people spoke several languages…so did everyone in geographically isolated places where trading and navigating required knowing the languages of one’s equally isolated neighbors. All this was endangered, thousands of years later, in the era of the nation…monolingualism became the standard model in most places, because the boundaries of the nation were drawn to include all the people who spoke alike. This unity was threatened by multilingualism and its taint of barbarity, impurity and unnatural mixing.” (p. 90)

And now, he adds, many counties just want one national tongue. I live in England, where there are people from all over the world, but English is the only language most people know. Young people might study other languages, but not seriously. “Politicians lectured Britons on learning languages so they could get jobs in the European Union, while universities removed foreign-language requirements and shut down language departments when enrollments dropped. Further, the government was constantly exporting English teachers, textbooks, courses, and programs, helping the country to earn £1.3 billion a year. In other words, learning language was for citizens of other countries-who would then compete with Britons for jobs. The irony was underscored by the fact that by 2005, immigrants had transformed London into a place where at least 307 languages are spoken, making the capital of one of the most monolingual countries in the European Union the most multilingual city on the planet.” (p. 71)

In other countries that Erard visits, such as Germany, a number of people want to learn multiple languages. But why? Some because it’s fun or a challenge, while others need to for work. Still others want to understand how language works, so they see learning languages as a sort of course in linguistics. Others learn many languages in order to have many selves. Erard interviews some people who dedicate their whole lives to learning languages, sometimes even to the detriment of their jobs or families.

But how many languages can you really know? Erard suggests we have too high expectations for our language skills. You’ll never speak another language like a native. “If you want to be better at languages, you should use native speakers as a metric of progress, though not as a goal…Embrace your linguistic outsiderness-it’s the way of the world…A language isn’t reserved for the perfectly calibrated native speaker. Words have currency even if they’re not perfectly wrought.” (p. 261)

He also offers advice from hyperpolyglots: “Some studies of successful language learners have suggested that they’re more “open to new experiences” than the rest of us…we have a self that’s bound up in our native language, a “language ego”, which needs to be loose and more permeable to learn a new language. Those with more fluid ego boundaries…are more willing to sound not like themselves, which means they have better accents in the new language.” (p. 238)

So have the courage to continue with your language studies and to dare to speak other tongues, even if you think you’re not that good at it!

Most of us will never know 15 or 30 languages. But it’s fun to read about them and to learn from them in Babel No More.

Language-Learning Apps

A few weeks ago, I referred to one language app, and now I’ve been told about another, the “Vocabulary Trainer”. It’s a “a mobile app to learn the most frequent words, travel phrases and slang (in total over 10,000 words and phrases) in over 30 languages.” It sounds intriguing, but I’m not sure if I think apps are the best way to learn languages. They can help in the moment, but I wonder if the material actually stays with you. What do you think?

Bilingualism

I read a couple of interesting articles recently on bilingualism. It’s such a shame that in English-speaking countries, we generally don’t start teaching children another language until they’re on the older side. And yet we know very well from research that the earlier we start the better. When will we learn?

The first article talks about how bilingualism changes children’s beliefs. “Most young children are essentialists: They believe that human and animal characteristics are innate. That kind of reasoning can lead them to think that traits like native language and clothing preference are intrinsic rather than acquired. But a new study suggests that certain bilingual kids are more likely to understand that it's what one learns, rather than what one is born with, that makes up a person's psychological attributes.”
The second piece looks at bilingualism from an older person’s perspective to explore what advantages speaking more than one language has on our brains as we age.

A Round-Up of Articles

Here’s a load of reading/viewing for the holiday season. It’ll keep you busy if you get tired of all the eating and shopping and spending time with relatives!

TED talks can be quite interesting. Here’s a TED blog post about learning languages.

This infographic is on second languages.

Here’s an article about translating Ibsen. The book I edited most recently also has an article on that. 

A piece on translating Chekhov has the headline “Any English-language version of Chekhov is doomed. The nature of translation means that to think otherwise is folly.” What do you think?

This review of a new book by translator and writer Tim Parks refers to translation.

How many words for death are there?

It’s impressive how one actor does accents of the British Isles.

Finally, an article on constructed languages.

Multiple Personalities

This article discusses whether people have a different personality for each language they speak. I’ve often felt somewhat different when speaking Swedish than when speaking English. It’s not just about having a different vocabulary and way of thinking about the world; there’s something about me that feels other. Do others feel the same (or, rather, different)?

Good Ideas

I was reading Michael Rosen’s great new book Good Ideas – a book that is indeed filled with good ideas for parents, teachers, and anyone really – and he has a section on getting children interested in language or using language as a way of interesting children in the world around them (pp. 235-9). Looking at signs in museums or supermarkets, reading horoscopes in foreign newspapers, checking for English among foreign words, and so on are just a few ways. I recommend the book as a whole, but these pages in particular for those who want to start making their children aware of linguistic and cultural differences.

A Round-Up of Articles

Here are a few articles on language that might be of interest.

This article discusses how learning languages is good for your brain.

If that’s the case, then what language should you study?

Why is studying grammar or, rather, understanding language, important?

And what grammar rules can you break?

Idioms

Idioms/proverbs/clichés can be one of the hardest bits of a language to learn, and they can also be really challenging to translate.

If a Swedish text says, “Don’t sell the bearskin before you’ve shot the bear,” should the translator keep that phrase as is (to retain the Swedishness of the text) or replace it with, say, “Don’t sell your chickens before they’ve hatched” (to make the text fit the English language better)? Or is there another, better solution (a footnote, for instance)? Interestingly, when I go to schools to talk to young people about translation, they are always evenly divided on this topic, with half the people wanting to keep the Swedish phrase and half wanting to replace it with an English equivalent.

When someone recently sent me a link with a list of Swedish idioms, I found it very interesting.

I then found a bunch of similar sites for English-language idioms, and I quite liked this one.

Perhaps you can add additional links for other languages in the comments.

Round-Up of Articles

It’s time for another round-up of interesting articles and other links.

I love Oliver Burkeman’s weekly column in the Guardian (and his two books based on the column). A recent column was on writing. He notes: “It’s the writer and reader, side by side, scanning the landscape. The reader wants to see; your job is to do the pointing.”

The New Yorker questions whether literature should be useful.

The BBC notes that young people are lacking language skills. “The UK’s education system is failing to produce enough people with foreign-language skills to meet a growing need from business, the CBI has said. Nearly two-thirds of about 300 UK firms surveyed by the business lobby group said they preferred staff with these skills. French, German and Spanish were highly prized but Arabic and Mandarin were growing in importance, it said.”

Test your vocabulary knowledge.

Check out these fascinating graphics on language in the U.S.

And, finally, a piece on slang.

Learning a New Language

Many of us who are translators are pretty obsessed with language. For some of us, this means we’re real linguaphiles, and we can’t stop ourselves from wanting to learn more tongues and take more language classes and buy more “teach yourself” language books.

I’ve been told by some people, however, that translators should just specialize and should focus on the one or two languages that they really know best. They say you can confuse yourself or spread your brain cells too thinly across the language zones. They say you no longer look like an expert but rather something of a dilettante.

I don’t agree. Yes, I think you need to continually improve your skills in your source and target languages (and this means reading, writing, speaking, and listening in them as often as possible, ideally every day). But I also think that the more you learn about other languages, the more knowledge you have about how language works generally, and how things sound in your source and target tongues in particular. You’re more open to the possibilities.

What do you think? How many languages do you know or have you studied? And out of those, how many do you work with regularly?

A Round-Up of Articles

It’s time for a round-up of interesting language/translation/writing-related articles! I have so many that I’ll divide them up into a couple of posts over the next couple of weeks!

First, here’s a piece from the BBC on slang.

“Literally” literally annoys me. My students often say (and write) things such as, “I literally died laughing.” No, you literally did not. Read about it here. Then laugh at this poster, which I own and use in class!

What is the coolest word in the English language? Do you think it’s “discombobulate”? Check out this post.

I used to live in Wales and still love going there, so this article on translating from Welsh intrigued me.

Learn English in the Philippines, which is apparently the world’s budget teacher.

My mother sent me this from Car Talk.

Finally, is it harder for women writers to get published? This article discusses that.

Yiddish and Hebrew

Last month, I was in Israel. So I thought it was appropriate to include some links here on Hebrew and Yiddish. Interestingly, I couldn’t find as many free options for these languages as I could for other tongues, but some of these links might be a start, and you can also check out some older posts on this blog for more on Yiddish and Hebrew.

Der Bay is a major online resource for Yiddish.

You can learn a little Yiddish here.

Shtetl has more info on Yiddish.

The Vilnius program is a well known one for learning Yiddish.

YIVO is, of course, the place to go for Yiddish.

Learn Hebrew using cartoons. It’s a very entertaining site!

Here is a free online course for learning Hebrew.

This site starts free, and then you can pay for more lessons.

And check out Ulpan for more Hebrew lessons online.

A Round-Up of Articles

My colleague Jo Drugan, who also teaches translation, sent me this fascinating story about historical vocabulary and anachronisms. For translators, finding language that suits the context can often be very challenging, and may require research.

This is another article sent by a colleague, this time Kate Griffin, who also works for the British Centre for Literary Translation. Happily, this article discusses how translation is becoming more visible in the US in academia.

Research often suggests that knowing multiple languages is good for us, but this article states that speed-learning a language is good.

If you can read Swedish, this piece claims that “poets are dangerous as translators”.

And sticking with Scandinavia, if you a want a laugh, watch this video to learn some Danish.

Links on Scotland

I noticed that I had a number of links to articles about Scotland, its language, and its culture, so I thought I’d combine them in one post.

Scotland is a gorgeous country, and I’ve really enjoyed the trips I’ve taken there. Gaelic is on the list of languages I’d like to learn one day.

The first article is on the language of the Picts.

Next, here is a piece on the death of a Scottish dialect.

Here is an an article that explores whether there is a formula for Scottishness (can there ever be a formula for any cultural identity?).

And if you want to learn Scottish Gaelic, you can check out this website or the tips on the BBC Alba site.

British Sign Language

My partner and I are taking a British Sign Language course together and we’re really enjoying it (although my partner is much better at it than I am!). Here’s a very useful website if you want to learn or refresh your skills in BSL.

Guest Post: Online Universities and Resources Look to Increase Bilingualism Around the World

Learning a language is a very valuable skill in a globalizing and increasingly competitive economy; however as this post discusses, it is something few Americans have managed to do. As technology improves, online language classes are becoming a viable option for people to use when learning a new language. Brave New Words visited the issue of a lack or language training in the United States in a guest article about 5 years ago. But since then, many more options have become available through the Internet for Americans who wish to learn a second language, as Jennifer Jenkins writes below. Jennifer is well-versed in all issues related to technology and online learning. Frequently, she contributes to http://www.onlineuniversity.net/, a resource for students who are considering attending school online.

Despite the need for bilingualism within our globalized society, most Americans only speak one language. Today, many US citizens are turning to web-based resources in order to learn another language – and many experts agree that these measures are highly effective.

According to a Gallup survey, roughly three-quarters of Americans believe that English fluency should be compulsory for US immigrants. However, the poll also revealed that only one quarter of the population could hold a conversation in a language other than English; the majority (55 percent) spoke Spanish, followed by European languages like French (17 percent) and German (10 percent). Rates of bilingualism did seem to increase with education; while one-fifth of high school graduates are bilingual, the percentage rose for college students (25 percent), college graduates (33 percent) and those with postgraduate degrees (43 percent). However, nearly 70 percent of all Americans believe that bilingualism is either essential or valuable in today’s job market.

According to a March 2012 article in The New York Times, employment opportunities are merely one of the benefits of bilingualism. Recent studies indicate that learning another language improves mental and cognitive skills – and may even ward off dementia and other conditions that come with age. Additionally, those who speak two or more languages are also more aware of their surroundings, says Spanish researcher Albert Costa. “Bilinguals have to switch languages quite often — you may talk to your father in one language and to your mother in another language,” he noted. “It requires keeping track of changes around you in the same way that we monitor our surroundings when driving.” There are also social benefits, due to the diverse social fabric in this country. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the number of children (ages 5-17) who spoke a second language at home rose from 10 percent in 1980 to 21 percent in 2009. In the coming years, bilingualism will play a major role in the way Americans communicate with one another.

The solution to improving widespread bi- and multilingualism may lie with the Internet, writes Eric A. Taub of NYT. As connectivity has risen on a global level and the advent of social media has essentially brought the world together, many companies have unveiled language programs for the masses. Breaking away from traditional curricula, these programs utilize interactive media, social networking and other unconventional tools to teach new language fluency. Many of these programs are free, though experts note that even the most expensive ones are far less costly than college tuition. And while brick-and-mortar courses typically require a substantial time commitment from students, e-courses allow learners to acquire language skills at their convenience.

The most popular electronic language program in recent years has been Rosetta Stone. For $1,000, students receive structured lessons, live video chats with native speakers and access to a web-based discussion forum; Rosetta Stone currently offers 30 language programs. TellMeMore is another popular online program. For an annual fee of $390, users can access extensive glossaries, communicate with native speakers via video and complete practice exercises for up to six different languages. Less expensive options include LiveMocha, which offers free lessons and charges a small fee for live tutorials with native speakers, and Babbel, which offers free trial lessons in English, Spanish, French, German and Italian, followed by a fee of $12 per month. Free programs include BBC Languages, which features audio and video media for more than 30 languages, and Busuu, an interactive course that utilizes online communities. Finally, smartphone apps are available from Lonely Planet Phrasebooks, Oxford Translator Travel Pro and World Nomad.

For years, Americans have earned a negative reputation among the international community for their low collective levels of bilingualism. Now, thanks to electronic media, US citizens are learning foreign languages at an unprecedented rate.